A coal-drying technology that will extract more energy from high moisture coal at less cost and simultaneously reduce potentially harmful emissions is ready for commercial use after successful testing at a Minnesota electric utility. The DryFiningTM technology – developed with funding from the first round of the US Department of Energy’s Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI) – uses waste heat from a power plant to reduce the moisture content of lignite, whilst also segregating particles by density. This means a significant amount of higher density compounds containing sulphur and mercury are sorted out and returned to the mine, rather than oxidised in the boiler. (more…)